Backstabbing for Beginners: My Crash Course in International Diplomacy by Michael Soussan

As he turned 24, Michael Soussan contemplated suicide. A high-minded Danish-born graduate living in New York, he had found himself working for the public-affairs lobbyist Jack Abramoff and was full of self-disgust at his own success in schmoozing politicians on behalf of big business.

Instead of killing himself, he quit, a good move in more than one sense: Abramoff was subsequently convicted of corrupting public officials, while Soussan landed the job of his dreams, working for the United Nations on the biggest aid programme it had ever attempted.

However, anyone familiar with the tales of Soussan's fellow countryman Hans Christian Andersen will expect dark truths to emerge from the most apparently innocent exteriors - and so it turns out. The UN programme was designed to deliver so-called humanitarian aid to the people of Iraq through supervised sales of that country's oil - otherwise known as oil-for-food. As we now know, this rapidly